Intermission: On Reading And 'Woah!'

Who would have thought? Not me, mate.

Hello again!

This is a quiet week for Everything Is Amazing, for the best kinds of reasons.

Normally things would look like this, and will do again from this coming Monday onwards.

But right now, I’m taking a moment.

Here are the two reasons why.

1) Um. Welcome!

It’s a month after this newsletter began, and before starting it, I made myself a rough plan: this many folk signed up by that date. Begin small, grow it quietly, stretch out the amount of time where I can savagely self-deprecate about it in public (this may just be a British thing) - and generally just take it steadily.

Well, that’s not what happened. Thanks to a few very kind & influential mentions here and there, I’ve blown past all that. At this point, there are around twice as many of you signed up than I was expecting. (Thank you!)

That has given me pause, in all the good ways.

2) So I Guess That Means…Woah.

My favourite podcast is WNYC’s Radiolab. It’s a show about how delightfully surprising the world is, if you look at it through the right scientific, medical, philosophical, political or even spiritual lens. It’s a show about weird ideas that might blow your mind. And it’s terrifically well-made.

But the main reason I love it is the way the presenters refuse to sound like experts.

Well, not really. They’re refusing to sound like what the incorrect popular stereotype of an “expert” is: the classic tedious know-it-all who delivers answers as Commandments that you should never, ever have the cheek to argue with. (“Oh, how dare you, little person. Don’t you know who I am?”)

I don’t quite know how this idiotic definition of expertise took hold. Maybe as a way to empower weaponised ignorance for the benefit of anti-factual populism? Dunno. I’m not the person to ask.

But I do know that it’s not how actual expertise works.

In the sciences, an expert is someone who knows more than most people about a thing. It doesn’t mean - and it never means - that the person knows everything about that thing, or is always correct, or is the absolute last word on the matter, or that their ideas shouldn’t be questioned, or they shouldn’t try to make themselves available for any healthy counter-argument.

(All those things would be examples of really bad science. That is not how the sciencing is done.)

Also, that omnipotent model of expertise is also a recipe for a total bore. Unassailable certainty is so miserably dull. Where’s the adventures in learning, discovering, exploring, playing with exciting possibilities? Where’s the journey here?

Radiolab gets the importance of ‘journey-learning’ better than anything I’ve ever heard. The presenters - who pretend they haven’t just spent the last week researching the living crap out of that week’s topic - guide you along a path of discovery and revelation and into those “woah!” moments that make your lower jaw sag. They’re so, so good at doing it.

(I’ve written more about their technique here.)

So with this newsletter, I wanted to channel a bit of that.

And I had a big advantage over Radiolab: the depth and breadth of my ignorance. I’m not a celebrated science writer or award-winning journalist. I am an enthusiast who is sharing everything he’s learning as he goes along.

Over the last four weeks of Everything Is Amazing, I’ve written about:

• How unseeing may be a popular trope of recent science fiction, but it’s also a real-world thing that kills our curiosity, because of the way our brain have to filter everything coming from our senses to stop us blowing a neurological fuse…

• How anhedonia, the inability to feel curious interest and pleasure in your surroundings, is a common symptom of clinical depression…

• How you’ll never guess what you’d find near your home if you drew a circle around it - and how forcing yourself to listen to music you really hate can be…well, “fun” isn’t the word. “Calming”? Definitely not. “Useful”? Perhaps that.

• How, in order to get truly curious about something, you need to know a little bit about it already, so an information gap can form…

• Why you don’t need to stick a foreign word on something to make it sexy…

• How colour-blindness (like any unconventional way of seeing the world) is practically a superpower…

• Why a good way to “find your passion” is to try lots of different things for no damn reason...

• How a listening journal is a really fun way of focusing your attention...

• And why unwanted sound, aka. noise, is awful for your physical health.

Along the way, my reading list grew and grew. I started with Ian Leslie’s brilliant Curious, then went sideways into Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt (on the importance of paying attention to the right things in life) and a bunch of associated science papers - and now I’m reading up on the neurobiology of memory, because next week I’ll be explaining why actually remembering stuff (instead of farming out our longterm memory to the internet) is so, so important…

Everything I’ve learned has led somewhere even more interesting - which has been going on ever since I started reading about curiosity, but in this last month it all got turned up to eleven.

And looking back, I’ve found I’ve been writing about the senses. I started with sight. I moved on to sound. I’m soon going to tackle smell (partly by chatting with a doctor recovering from COVID-19 who got curious about her new inability to smell things). None of this was premeditated. It’s just where things are leading me.

I guess that’s now my topic for the rest of what I’m loosely calling this first “season” of Everything Is Amazing. Which means I have all sorts of new reading to do. Hooray! And also, oh blimey. More coffee needed, then.

So that’s why I’ve been taking a week here. (That, and the need to catch up on a bit of paid work last week.)

I’ll be back for the second half of this thing from Monday. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, if you want some great curiosity-based reading (plus some interesting research on how noise really messes up our bodies), I urge you to check out this edition of Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter.

See you next week!

- Mike

Images: 👀 Mabel Amber 👀; Vlad Bagacian; Element5 Digital.